Word: palmed
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...Dallas.' It's 'Perry Mason.' It's 'Rashomon.' With the Palm Beach party-land ambience, the Kennedy name and faces, the dramatic opening testimony of the woman known to television audiences as 'the alleged victim,' the trial of William K. Smith is proving to be a television spectacular...
...citizens, who have maintained a hangdog pride in being off the beaten path, Fresno has become one of the fastest-growing major cities in America. In Fresno people had always felt that they were in California but not of it -- a little bit of Iowa under the palm trees. Now their sleepy farm town is growing nearly as fast as crops planted in the dull, rich land of the surrounding San Joaquin Valley...
...Never mind, say I. People who sneer thus are merely afflicted with geography envy; they are wedded to the misconception that a glorious autumn must be followed by a dark and dreary winter. There are those, nurtured on another coast, who believe nothing great can be accomplished where palm trees grow outdoors. The technical innovations in electronics and biotechnology begotten by labs at Stanford and Berkeley, not to mention the invention of the Jefferson Airplane, put the lie to such wrongheaded thinking. Important things do happen here...
What the Kennedy family may lack this time is the deference that its name has customarily evoked. It is not just that the Palm Beach gentry always considered the Kennedys arrivistes, even after one of them was elected President of the U.S. And it is not just that the family of the alleged victim -- unlike the Kopechnes, who did not criticize the Kennedys until the 20th anniversary of the drowning -- knows its way around the legal system and has the money to pay for it. The difference is that the prosecutor, Moira Lasch, has a near 100% conviction rate...
...last May, the Kennedys have hired private analysts as far afield as Texas and Michigan to examine hair, blood and particle samples. Duke University's Institute of Policy Sciences and Public Affairs conducted two public opinion polls for Smith to determine if he could get a fair trial in Palm Beach. Three detectives, including Steve Roadruck, nicknamed "Dr. Dirt" for his ability to unearth damaging details, have worked for nearly three months to help discredit both the accuser and her story. The strategy, as laid out in court documents, is to prove that Smith's accuser has a "longstanding psychological...